Lizzie Lou Arts
Lizzie Lou Arts grew out of a walk...
Long before it had a name, it was already happening in tables dressed with things gathered from outside, in mud and straw shaped by many hands into homes and sculptures, in a children's fire exhibition that burned bright at Arts Ablaze in 2019.
Then came a walk, in 2023, it was 6,371 kilometres across Australia and somewhere along that path, the creative life that had always been running underneath everything found its name and its container.I've come to understand that creativity and wellbeing are the same current running through a life. Not separate streams but the same water. When we make something, when we pay close attention to the world and find a way to express what we see and feel, something in us comes more fully alive.
Art is not a luxury or a talent reserved for the few. It turns up everywhere in the unfurling of a fern, in the drawings scratched onto walls in concentration camps, in the way a child reaches for colour before they reach for words. Each of us carries a story that is more than words, and creativity is how that story finds its shape.
Lizzie Lou Arts is that belief, lived out loud. Beauty, meaning, purpose. A creative life as a whole life.I live in a hand built strawbale home, volunteer built , solar powered off-grid, made from 80% recycled materials in Running Creek, on Mingenberri country, in Queensland's Scenic Rim.
My studio is wherever I am.
What I am currently working on…
Currently in rough sketches, still indevelopment..."Same Sky, Blue for Five" is a textile installation exploring the shared vulnerability of breath. Five sets of lungs a horse, chicken, dog, greater glider, and human shapes of lungs are cut from blue vinyl, each form a quiet reminder that the air we draw into our bodies is the same air every creature on this country draws into theirs. There are no borders in the atmosphere. There is no filter at the species line.
The work was made in response to the proposed waste incinerator for the Scenic Rim, but its question is older and wider than any single campaign. When we poison the air, we do not poison it selectively. The horse in the paddock, the dog at your feet, the greater glider high in its hollow, the child asleep in the next room.
All of them breathing.
All of them at risk.
None of them consulted.
All of them under the same blue sky.
Also on the bench…
The Long Walk Home — a memoir in progress
From the Feild
I make work at ground level on hands and knees in the leaf litter, watching a beetle negotiate a stick, following the logic of lichen. The intimate world asks for a particular kind of attention: slow, unhurried, willing to be surprised by smallness. Forest Floor & Creatures is where that attention lives.
From that same ground I walked 6,371 kilometres across the skin of this continent, Australia, country as teacher, country as text. The Long Walk Home is the art and writing that came from that journey: the dust and the distance, the grief and the grace, the way Australia holds you and breaks you open at once.
Country runs beneath all of it, place as teacher, belonging as practice, the long work of learning to be known by a landscape, grateful and grieving by turns. Care for people and care for place are the same work: advocacy, programs, showing up and love made practical and particular.
